Robert M. Hutchins Quotes

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

This is a do-it-yourself test for paranoia: you know you've got it when you can't think of anything that's your fault.

Most people spend their time on the 'urgent' rather than on the 'important.'

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts ... it is to teach them to think.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.

There is only one justification for universities, as distinguished from trade schools. They must be centers of criticism.

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

The best education for the best is the best education for all.

The task is overwhelming, and the chance is slight. We must take the chance or die.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.

More free time means more time to waste. The worker who used to have only a little time in which to get drunk and beat his wife now has time to get drunk, beat his wife - and watch TV.

Nature will not forgive those who fail to fulfill the law of their being. The law of human beings is wisdom and goodness, not unlimited acquisition.

Democracy has not failed; the intelligence of the race has failed before the problems the race has raised

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

When I feel like exercising I just lie down until the feeling goes away.

The most distressing aspect of the world into which you are going is its indifference to the basic issues, which now, as always, are moral issues.

It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness which would do credit to any college student, but the monkey is serious because he itches.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

To solve a problem it is necessary to think. It is necessary to think even to decide what facts to collect.

Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool.

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.